Download An Introduction to Second Language Vocabulary

An Introduction to
Second Language Vocabulary
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK is to discuss eight pervasive myths or misconceptions regarding the teaching and learning of second language
vocabulary. To better appreciate this discussion, a simple overview of
basic concepts in second language vocabulary study are in order.
This overview is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the
question of what we mean by the term vocabulary when nonnative
speakers are studying a target language. Here we look at single words,
set phrases, variable phrases, phrasal verbs, and idioms. The second
part covers seven components of what it means to know a word. While
the definition of the word is an obvious component, others include a
word’s frequency, register, spelling, and collocations. This last component in particular is important for learners to be able to use a word
correctly.
Before you read any further, how would you answer these questions:
1. What are the different kinds of vocabulary in
English?
2. What are the components of knowing a word? Or,
what does it mean to know a word?
/ 1
2 \ Vocabulary Myths
PART I:
What Is “a Vocabulary”?
When we talk about learning vocabulary in another language, we immediately envision a list of words. Upon more careful inspection of
our imaginary list, we would probably see that, for the most part, our
list is composed of single unit words such as dozen, awkward, and
feedback. However, vocabulary (or “vocabularies,” as our students mistakenly call it when they assume that vocabulary is a count noun, as in
“Teacher, I learned 10 vocabularies last night.”) can be much more
than just a single unit word.
There are in fact many different kinds of vocabulary items or
“words.” This is especially true when nonnative learners eye their target
language as linguistic outsiders. One simple way to look at vocabulary
for second language learners is single words, set phrases, variable
phrases, phrasal verbs, and idioms.
Single Words
This is the group that most people think of first. By far, this group includes the bulk of the vocabulary of any language. This group includes
not only more items but also more frequently used items:
•
•
•
•
•
•
animals: cat, dog, elephant
time periods: Monday, January, today
countries: Egypt, Mexico, Somalia
actions in the past: flew, stayed, went
descriptions: happy, amazing, destructive
counters: dozen, plenty, decade
Despite the name, however, this group also includes multiword vocabulary. Consider the words thunderstorm and ice storm. Both are single
“words” even though ice storm requires two words to express its concept
while thunderstorm requires only one. The number of actual words in
the vocabulary item is the result of spelling conventions peculiar to
English, not a vocabulary-related issue. The explanation of whether a
compound vocabulary item is written as one word or two does not ap-
An Introduction / 3
pear to be semantically based. For example, a cloth for a table is a
tablecloth (one word) while a cup for coffee is a coffee cup (two words).
Other examples of compound nouns being written as one word or
two words on the apparent whims of English spelling conventions include graveyard, homework, and holiday versus traffic light, bread box,
and table scraps.
Set Phrases
These phrases consist of more than one word and do not usually
change. For example, in the set phrase in other words, we cannot say with
other words or in other terms or in other remarks or in other phrases or
other variations, even though terms and remarks and perhaps phrases
might seem to be able to fit.
• in other words
not:
• raining cats and dogs
not:
• the bottom line
not:
• all of a sudden
not:
• it’s up to you
not:
in other terms (but terms
are words)
raining kittens and puppies (you can only have
the adult animals)
the lowest line (but the
bottom is the lowest)
most of a sudden (it’s
either all or nothing—
but we don’t have none
of a sudden either)
it’s above to you (but up
and above are close
synonyms)
Other set phrases must be worded in a certain order even though
rearranging the ordering would not really affect the meaning. However,
English conventions have locked these phrases into only one possible
ordering:
• raining cats and dogs
• up and down
not:
not:
raining dogs and cats
down and up
4 \ Vocabulary Myths
•
•
•
•
from head to toe
back and forth
to and fro
ladies and gentlemen
not:
not:
not:
not:
from toe to head
forth and back
fro and to
gentlemen and ladies
(though common in
many languages)
Variable Phrases
While most of the components in variable phrases will stay the same,
there is some variation. The variation often involves personal pronouns or some sort of possessive. For example, a usual form of the
opening line of many business letters, especially from companies writing to inform you of a problem, is It has come to our attention that . . . .
This line could easily be It has come to my attention that . . . if it were
coming from your boss or coworker.
How would you complete these sentences?
Situation A: You studied French in high school for one year, then
you studied two years in college (with a one-year interval between the
two years), and then you studied a month or two here and there. A
friend asks you, “How long have you been studying French?” You answer, “Well, let me see. I guess I’ve been studying French __________
for about eight years.” What phrase would you use to complete this
sentence with the idea that sometimes you did this and sometimes you
did not?
Situation B: It’s 6:00 P.M. When you woke up this morning, it was
raining. It stopped mid-morning. Just before noon, it started raining
again but only briefly. Later, it rained from 2:00 P.M. to 3:30 P.M. About
an hour ago, it started drizzling again. If you were to call someone in a
different part of the country and that person asked you about the
weather where you are, you might say, “Well, it’s been raining
__________ all day long.” What phrase would you use to indicate the
nature of today’s rain?
The answer to both Situations A and B is off and on or on and off. (I
An Introduction / 5
personally never say on and off and was quite surprised to hear others
say this. I wonder if this is regional usage.)
Another example of a variable phrase is It has come to _____
attention that + S + V. You know that this phrase is formal and serious.
You also know that it is used more in writing than in speaking. You
know that if you receive a letter that begins It has come to our attention
that you . . . , the message is usually not good. This phrase really means
something like “I’m going to tell you what you did and the problem
that it has caused.” This phrase is not about knowing it + has come + to
+ (anyone’s attention). This is a good example of where a learner needs
to know this whole phrase as a single phrase or single vocabulary item.
The only thing that could change in this expression is the possessive
adjective before the word attention, with my and our being much more
common than her or their although, in theory, any possessive adjective
could work here.
Phrasal Verbs
Your awareness of phrasal verbs is critical to your ability as a native
speaker to provide comprehensible input for your ESL students. Native
speakers have no idea that they are using phrasal verbs, nor do they see
why these words are so hard for ESL students to deal with.
What is a phrasal verb? A phrasal verb consists of two or three
words. The first word is always a verb. The second word in a phrasal
verb is a preposition or particle/adverb. If there is a third word, it is
usually a preposition. A good example is put up with, meaning to tolerate or stand.
Many verbs can serve as the verb in a phrasal verb, but common
ones include put, take, come, call, make, go, and get.
examples:
put away, put off, put on, put up, put up with,
put down, come back, come off as, come up
with, come down with
6 \ Vocabulary Myths
Understanding phrasal verbs is problematic for ESL students for
four reasons. First, phrasal verbs are extremely common in English.
(They occur in Germanic languages but not in Romance languages.)
You cannot function in English without knowing a large number of
phrasal verbs very well. Therefore, ESL learners must know the meanings of the more frequent ones even in the simplest of exchanges. In
trying to provide good comprehensible input for students, ESL teachers
must be aware of phrasal verbs so they can better gauge the level of
their input. What appears comprehensible may not be so, and the
biggest factor may be phrasal verbs.
A second problem is that phrasal verbs are rarely transparent in
meaning. Knowing the parts of the phrasal verb does not equal knowing the whole phrasal verb. The example that I always use in teacher
training workshops to get people’s attention is throw up. If you know
throw (as many of our low-level students do) and if you know up (as almost any beginner does), it should follow then—but does not—that
you will know the meaning of throw up.
Consider these examples that have call as a base. Each phrasal verb
has a very different meaning.
1. He called off the meeting.
2. I called up Joe to invite him to the game.
3. Can you call me back later?
4. The teacher called on the sleeping student.
5. Mr. Graves called me in to discuss my job performance.
6. She called out the answers.
In addition, there is another level of meaning that phrasal verbs
can express in English, and this subtle sociolinguistic meaning is very
hard for our ESL students to capture. Phrasal verbs are one way that we
express informality in English conversation. Unlike English, many languages have syntactic ways of expressing informality and familiarity—
for example, verb endings vary depending on whether the subject is the
formal or informal you. Consider the examples in Table 1.
An Introduction / 7
TABLE 1 Formal vs. Informal Present Tense Endings
Language
Formal you
Informal you
Spanish
[usted] habla (you speak)
[usted] come (you eat)
[tu] hablas (you speak)
[tu] comes (you eat)
Japanese
hanashimasu (you speak)
tabemasu (you eat)
hanasu (you speak)
taberu (you eat)
French
vous parlez (you speak)
vous mangez (you eat)
tu parles (you speak)
tu manges (you eat)
English verbs do not operate in a similar way, so ESL students who
are trying to translate “formality” through grammatical endings will
have a perplexing time. Not only does English not have a grammatical solution to this problem, it actually requires learners to know
multiple labels or vocabulary for the very same social function.
Consider the word that means to “to get rid of something, especially
something that is viewed as useless or unpleasant.” The word that the
learner is looking for is discard, yet in natural conversation, we do not
use this word. Instead, we use the phrasal verb throw away, which
sounds more conversational than the more formal discard, just as put
up with is easier on the ears than tolerate.
A third difficulty of phrasal verbs is that they are often reduced in
conversation. Thus, they are not only hard to comprehend semantically, they are simply hard to hear. Consider this conversation:
A: What did you think of the test?
B: I thought it was kind of tough, especially the last part.
A: Yeah, it was. Hey, did you come up with a good answer for the essay question?
B: At first, no, but then I started writing down a few
things, and then the answer just sort of took off.
8 \ Vocabulary Myths
An ESL student would have a hard time hearing the pieces of each of
these phrasal verbs. In think of, the word of is greatly reduced as is with in
come up with. In the example took off, the two words get run together so
that they sound much more like “to cough” than took and off. If—and
this is a huge assumption that should never be underestimated—
the student has actually been able to accurately hear the phrasal verb
and caught all the pieces, then the learner still faces the semantic challenge: What does it mean? This is further complicated in conversation
because the conversation keeps flowing as the learner is still trying to
decipher the phrasal verb, and more phrasal verbs are bombarding him
or her.
The fourth problem of phrasal verbs is the particle or preposition.
This added part is actually critical to meaning because it is what differentiates postpone (put off) from get dressed (put on) or solve a problem
(come up with) from get sick (come down with). Phrasal verbs can be separable or nonseparable. For example, we can say, “The teacher called off
the test,” but we can also say, “The teacher called the test off.” Either of
these is correct. In the first example, the ESL learner is lucky in that the
pieces of the phrasal verb are next to each other. However, in the second example, the word off, which is crucial to the meaning of call off, is
actually three words away.
As if that were not complicated enough, English actually allows the
particle to “float” much more than three words away. Consider this
conversation involving the phrasal verb look up, meaning to search for
information in a book or other source:
A: Did you do the homework?
B: What homework?
A: Well, we were supposed to look all those Latin and
Greek roots on page 52 up.
B: Are you serious? I forgot!
In this example, up is located ten words away from look. This kind of
structure happens frequently in conversation and is yet another example of why phrasal verbs are difficult vocabulary for ESL learners.
An Introduction / 9
Idioms
All languages feature idiomatic expressions, and each idiomatic expression, or idiom, is a vocabulary item. The test of whether a “chunk” is an
idiom or not is whether the sum of the meanings of the individual words
is equal to or similar to the meaning of the whole phrase.
Most phrasal verbs, for example, are idiomatic. As explained earlier,
throw up is not the sum of throw and up. ESL learners are confused
when they find out that the opposite of put on clothing is not put off
clothing. If removing clothing is to take off clothing, then why isn’t the
opposite taking on clothing? With idioms, logic often has no place.
When a person lets the cat out of the bag, there is no cat, there is no bag,
and there is no cat in any bag. The words let, cat, out, and bag are all frequent words, ones that might be covered in any basic or even beginninglevel English class. However, knowing the meaning of these four words
hardly prepares the learner to figure out the meaning of this idiom. Other
idioms include raining cats and dogs, feeling blue, sell like hotcakes, jump
the gun, be up in the air, get with it, shake a leg, a feather in one’s cap, wake
up on the wrong side of the bed, and have a bad hair day.
The best work on identifying which idioms are used in spoken
American English was done by Liu (2003), who examined three corpora containing a total of six million words. The composite list contains three bands according to the usage. Here are the top 15 idioms
(in order of frequency) from Band 1, the most frequently used idioms
in spoken American English: kind of, sort of, of course, in terms of, in fact,
deal with, at all, as well, make sure, go through, come up, look for, find out,
go on, and as well as. It is easy to see that these examples are idioms because they do not mean what they would appear to mean—that is,
their literal meaning is not being used. For example, kind as a noun
means “type” or “class.” However, consider the literal and idiomatic
meanings of kind of here:
Literal:
The cobra is a kind of snake.
Idiomatic: It’s kind of hot today, isn’t it?
10 \ Vocabulary Myths
What Does It Mean to Know a Word?
What Does Knowing a Word Include?
PART II:
When you ask a student, “Do you know this word?” and the student
says, “Yes,” what proof would convince you that the student does indeed know the word? More than likely, the answer is the meaning of
the word. To answer the question, “Do you know this word?” we expect
a student to provide the meaning. However, knowing a word involves
much more than knowing just its meaning.
Polysemy
First of all, a word rarely has just one meaning. Most words in English
are polysemous, that is, they have multiple meanings. Some have relatively few meanings. For example, shovel can be the instrument or the
action. (This may not seem like two things to you, but note how we
shovel with a shovel, mop with a mop, and mow with a mower, but we
sweep with a broom, paint with a brush, and charge with a card.)
With a relatively small number of meanings, shovel is clearly in the
minority in English. Table can be the piece of furniture, a set of numbers or figures, the action of not talking about something in a meeting,
or a descriptive word (as in table scraps or tablecloth). Other words
have multiple meanings: put, put on, put down, put off, put away, put up
with, put back, etc.
An example that the students like to confront us with is get, so it behooves teachers to become very familiar with this verb. Consider how
the meaning of get changes so dramatically in these examples: get mail
(receive without trying), get the mail (go to a place to retrieve it), get the
measles (contract a sickness), get angry (become), get to the airport (arrive),
get in a car (enter), get washed (passive voice), and many others.
Connotation
All words have a denotation and a connotation. The denotation refers
to the most basic or specific meaning of a word. In contrast, a connotation is an idea that is suggested by or associated with a word. For example, the word scum is just the name of a layer that forms on the sur-
An Introduction / 11
face of a body of water, but the word has connotations of impurity,
badness, and ugliness.
Table 2 illustrates denotation and connotation of five words that
express a similar concept.
While denotation is fairly straightforward, connotation can vary. The
connotation of a word can change from negative to positive or vice-versa
over time. The connotation of a word can also vary from culture to culture (even with two cultures or groups that speak the same language) as
well as from individual to individual. The connotations listed in Table 2,
for example, are the connotations that I, based on my life experiences,
would assign to these words. To me, thin is a neutral word. To some,
hearing “You look so thin!” would be a positive statement, while to others it would be a negative statement. To me, skinny has a neutral to negative connotation. Slim seems to be more positive when it deals with
weight. (In contrast, in the phrase slim chance, it has a negative connotation, but that is a different meaning.) Lean and slender have positive connotations, which explains why weight loss or nutrition companies have
chosen these words for their brand names (e.g., Lean Cuisine®).
Connotation can also impact a nonnative speaker’s ability to learn a
new vocabulary item since the positive or negative value assigned to a
word by the learner also plays a role in how difficult a word is to learn.
Positive words are easier to remember than negative words (Ludwig,
1984). In two empirical studies (Yavuz, 1963; Yavuz & Bousfield, 1959),
English-speaking individuals learned translations of 18 Turkish words
equally divided into positive, neutral, and negative words. In both
TABLE 2 Denotation vs. Connotation
Word
Denotation
Connotation
thin
not overweight
neutral image
skinny
not overweight
negative image
slim
not overweight
positive image
lean
not overweight
positive image
slender
not overweight
positive image
12 \ Vocabulary Myths
experiments, recall was significantly better for the positively loaded
words than for the neutral or negative words. The teaching principle
here is that words that have (or seem to have—to the learner at least) a
negative connotation may be more difficult to commit to memory.
Spelling and Pronunciation
English is a language that has a relatively low letter-to-sound correlation, thus making many English words difficult to spell and/or pronounce (from the written letters). This is especially true when English
is compared with languages such as Japanese or Spanish where pronunciation is consistent with the way words are spelled.
Knowing the spelling of a word is in itself quite an accomplishment for a nonnative speaker. Consider the sound /i/ (ee in some dictionaries). This one sound can be written in at least eight different
ways: eat, need, retrieve, people, key, receive, be, lazy. Likewise, knowing the correct pronunciation can be problematic. The letter a can be
pronounced in at least five ways: cat /ae/, father /a/, lawn /[ƒ]/, cake /eI/,
interval /´ [schwa]/.
Part of Speech
Knowing the part of speech of a word is important. It is important
when learners know two or more forms for one word: wise (adj.), wisely
(adv.), wisdom (n.). It is also important when similar words confound
the situation: lend (v.) vs. loan (n.) or affect (v.) vs. effect (n.).
The part of speech of a word can make a word harder to master.
“Psychological research shows differential performance on tasks
involving nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, indicating that the
form class of a word is a reasonably potent variable in verbal tasks”
(Ludwig, 1984, p. 554). While the exact ranking of the parts of speech
in terms of difficulty is not clear, Laufer (1990) sums it up best: “It is
sometimes argued that certain grammatical categories are more difficult to learn than others. Nouns seem to be the easiest; adverbs—the
most difficult; verbs and adjectives—somewhere in between” (p. 298).
In follow-up interviews of learners using the keyword method,
Atkinson (1975) found similar results. Learners reported that the keyword method worked best for nouns, less well for verbs, and least well
An Introduction / 13
for adjectives. Phillips (in Laufer, 1990) noted an interaction between
the effect that part of speech has on word difficulty and the proficiency
level that a learner has: nouns were easier to learn than verbs or adjectives, an effect that decreased as the learner’s proficiency increased.
Abstract words seem to be more difficult than concrete words.
According to Mackey (1965), the reason that nouns are easier to remember than verbs or adjectives is probably a function of concreteness and of
frequency. Laufer (1990) cautions, however, that “if all the other features
of two words were identical, the concrete one would probably be easier.
In the real learning situation, however, many concrete words present a
problem since they may contain other factors of difficulty” (p. 300).
Some teachers may assume that once a learner knows one of the
basic four forms of a word (i.e., noun, verb, adjective, adverb), the
learner either knows or easily learns all four forms. This is not the
case. In a study of 106 undergraduate and graduate nonnative
English–speaking students, Schmitt and Zimmerman (2002) found
that it was rare for a student to know all four forms or no form of a
word. In other words, partial knowledge of at least one form was the
norm. Results also showed that learners tended to have a better understanding of the noun and/or verb forms rather than the adjective
and/or adverb forms. The authors conclude that teachers cannot assume that learners will absorb the derivative forms of a word family
automatically from exposure and suggest explicit instruction in this
area of vocabulary.
Frequency
Knowing a word can also mean that the learner knows the frequency of
occurrence of that word. Though this aspect of a word may seem almost trivial, the frequency of a word is often cited as a major factor in
a given word’s difficulty. In fact, Haynes (1993) claims that word frequency is probably the major component in word difficulty.
A given word may well express the concept that the person wants to
express; however, that concept may have several possible names, some
of which may be more useful to a nonnative learner because that particular word is more frequent. The rarer forms, though most certainly
semantically appropriate, would make the speaker sound strange.
14 \ Vocabulary Myths
Complete this sentence with a word that means that you are extremely hungry: “I’m _______________.” Many people would complete
the sentence with the word starving, but words such as ravenous and
famished are certainly possible. However, ravenous and famished are not
nearly as common as starving. Likewise, while violet and purple may
refer to the same color, the latter is used much more frequently, so a
nonnative learner should also use purple more often than violet. Using
the word violet when the vast majority of native speakers would say purple would “mark” the learner’s English as non-native.
Usage
Knowing a word also means knowing when it is appropriate to use that
word instead of a synonym or similar word. This information about
usage can include both syntactic information (e.g., we hardly ever use
this verb in passive voice) and pragmatic information (e.g., we do not
use this word when speaking to people of higher status). For example,
the words thing and stuff are similar in meaning, but one is considered
a standard word while the other is considered slang or informal language. The first word would be considered acceptable to use in, say, a
job interview, but the second one would probably not.
Let us consider the concept of “not continue to live.” The basic vocabulary item to express this concept is the word die. At the same time,
let us consider differences in usage of three other vocabulary items that
express the same denotation.
We can say, “I’m sorry to hear that your mother died,” but it might
be more common, especially when talking with a known person and
wishing to convey our sympathy, to say, “I’m sorry to hear that your
mother passed away.” Thus, the usage of pass away may be restricted to
a speaker who knows the listener and who wishes to express sincere regret or sympathy. That same person could not say, “I’m sorry to hear
that your mother kicked the bucket” or “I’m sorry to hear that your
mother is pushing up daisies.”
The vocabulary item kick the bucket is often used for a deceased person that we did not know or did not care for much. Thus, there is a
pragmatic/sociolinguistic usage issue with this vocabulary item. In ad-
An Introduction / 15
dition, there is a syntactic issue with kick the bucket. In the example of
SUBJECT + kick + the bucket, the subject must be a person or living
thing, kick would be a transitive verb, and the bucket would be the object of the verb. Thus, kick is in the active voice. Any verb in the active
voice can also be used in the passive voice. Consider, however, the
usage problems associated with this particular vocabulary item in these
two examples:
1. The old man kicked the bucket last week. (active voice)
2. The bucket was kicked by the old man last week.
(passive voice)
In Sentence 1, active voice, the meaning could be literal (the old man
really did use his foot to kick the bucket) or it could be figurative/
idiomatic (the old man died). In Sentence 2, passive voice, the meaning can only be the literal meaning that the old man actually kicked the
bucket. Therefore, in terms of usage, this particular idiom cannot be
used in passive voice. This is a special usage issue for this vocabulary
item since all active voice verbs should be able to be transformed to a
passive voice form as well.
Similarly, the vocabulary item push up daisies has several special
usage issues. Syntactically, push up daisies would appear to be a simple
V + O construction. Given that push is a verb, we could in theory use
this verb in any of the 12 different verb tenses. However, the verb in
this vocabulary item is rarely used in any tense except a future progressive construction with going to or with will: He’s going to be pushing
up daisies. He’ll be pushing up daisies. This expression does not occur
in simple past tense even though die is frequently used in the past
tense: He pushed up daisies vs. He died. Another syntactic usage issue
is that this expression, similar to what we saw with kick the bucket, occurs only in active voice, never in passive voice. We cannot say even in
future progressive tense, “Daisies will be being pushed up by him.”
This vocabulary item also has a pragmatic/sociolinguistic usage
limitation. At a register level, we could say that kick the bucket and push
up daisies are slang or informal language while die and pass away are
standard words. A nonnative learner could easily assume—albeit
16 \ Vocabulary Myths
incorrectly—that the two slang expressions could be used interchangeably, as could the two standard vocabulary items. Natural usage of
push up daisies is in situations involving a warning of an impending
death for a certain reason. Consider this example: He’ll be pushing up
daisies if he testifies against us.
Collocation
Perhaps the single most important aspect of knowing a word for nonnative learners—besides or in addition to the obviously requisite synonym or denotation meaning—is the collocation(s) of a new vocabulary item. The meaning of collocation is apparent in its constituent
parts: co (together) + location (place). A collocation is a word or
phrase that naturally and frequently occurs before, after, or very near
the target vocabulary item.
Make a sentence in your head with the word squander, which means
to waste or use unwisely. (Do not go on without coming up with an example!) In theory, any noun could follow the word squander, but the
most common collocations for squander in English are money or resources
(salary, $1,000, or inheritance), time (the morning, her vacation, a lifetime), or opportunity (opportunity, chance, prospect). Thus, common collocations for the verb squander are money, time, and opportunity.
Consider the vocabulary item commit. Commit has three different
meanings: (1) make or do, (2) dedicate resources, or (3) be dedicated to,
always used in the passive voice. One could argue that these are three different words, so we will work with the first meaning only, which is “to
make or do.” Complete this sentence: He committed _________________.
What are some examples that pop into your head right away?
The most common collocations for commit as a verb are all types of
crimes: commit murder, commit suicide, commit grand larceny, commit adultery. Thus, commit does not mean just “do or make” but “do or make
something negative.” An ESL student who learns that commit in commit a
murder means “to do or perform an action” might attempt to make the
following seemingly logical combinations: commit a joke on someone, commit the housework, commit a lie. The problem—a huge problem for nonnative learners—is that commit does not collocate with joke, housework, or lie.
An Introduction / 17
The most common vocabulary items collocate with all sorts of
words. The rarer the vocabulary word is (i.e., more likely to be an “advanced” word for a second language learner), the fewer the collocations will be. The verb take can collocate with a taxi, a shower, medicine,
a test, a person from one place to another, someone’s temperature, a credit
card, and on and on. In fact, the verb take derives its meaning from its
object collocation. On the other hand, a rarer word such as exempt has
more specific collocations. In the active voice, the word following exempt will almost always be a person. The next collocation slot will be
the word from. The third collocation slot will be some sort of requirement. The collocation patterns for the word exempt are illustrated here:
Collocations for EXEMPT
(subject)
exempt
(all verb
tenses
possible)
(someone)
from
a requirement
a test
taking the test
having to get a
passport
Certain target vocabulary can have rather complex collocations,
and knowing which words can be used with the new word can make
that word (even) more difficult for L2 learners. Collocations may vary
greatly from language to language and may therefore not be transferred
from L1 to L2. Because of both the difficulty and the importance of collocations (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992), McCarthy (1994) advocates
direct instruction and practice in this area.
What obviously then follows from this is, how can teachers know
which words collocate with a certain vocabulary item? The first answer is
to trust your intuition as a native speaker. What would you say in this particular example? Make up a sentence in your head, but remove yourself
from any classroom or ESL setting. How do you think a native speaker
would naturally use that word? If you are a nonnative speaker, trust your
knowledge of English. You have attained a certain level of knowledge of
English, and you most likely know what combines with what.
A second solution is to use data from corpus linguistics. A corpus is
18 \ Vocabulary Myths
a set or body of language examples such as actual newspapers, books,
transcripts of conversations or interviews, or movie scripts. All of the
corpus becomes the source or databank from which collocation software is used to identify collocations. For example, if we did a search for
the word convey, we might find these examples:
. . . he said. I think he wanted to convey the message that there is hope that . . .
. . . do you think is the best way to convey this information? Is it that we are . . .
. . . Wilson had failed to accurately convey what the Prime Minister said. An . . .
. . . say they rely on Mr. Sims to
convey messages that they do not want . . .
. . . public demonstrations does not convey a message independently of the . . .
This is but a small example, but we can see that convey frequently collocates with the word message. Other collocations for convey are information and what (someone) say/says/said. This information is important
so that teachers do not tell students that convey means “send” but
rather that convey a message means to send a message. From this students
can then understand that convey information means to send information.
The teaching point here is to teach the collocation, not just the meaning of one of the words in isolation when in fact that word does not
usually occur alone? (When is the last time you said, “Yes, I’ll convey
that to you tomorrow”? Never!)
What Does All of This Mean?
What we have seen so far is that vocabulary in any language is a complex
issue. In ESL terms, there are many kinds of vocabulary. Most people
think of only single words. To be sure, these are numerous and problematic for our learners, but there are many other kinds of vocabulary that
present additional and important challenges. We have also seen that
knowing a word is not nearly as straightforward as it may have seemed.
Is knowing a synonym sufficient? Is translating enough? Is the ability to
use the word in a sentence enough? The important point as we look at
the eight myths presented in this book is that a word is not just a single
word and that knowing a word is actually a multipart task.